Toddler joins Mensa at age 2—but his mom says support matters more than scores
When most parents hear the word Mensa, they probably picture a room full of academics—not a toddler still in diapers. But 2-year-old Joseph Harris-Birtill just made history as the youngest person ever accepted into the high-IQ society, joining at just 2 years and 182 days old.
The British toddler began reading full books before age two. He can now count to ten in five different languages, is learning Morse code, and is developing a love for the periodic table. It's an extraordinary set of milestones—but what's even more remarkable is how grounded his parents remain.'We hope that this accomplishment can give him a sense of pride when he is older,' his mom, Rose, told Guinness World Records. 'It's a very unusual accolade—and the credit is all his.'
Related: Baby milestones by month: A parents' guide to tracking your child's development in the first year
Joseph rolled over at five weeks, spoke his first word at seven months, and was reading aloud before his second birthday. By 2¼ years old, he could read fluently for 10 minutes at a time and count forward and backward past 100.
His parents describe him as 'an exceptional little being,' but they weren't pushing for a headline—they were simply trying to keep up with a little boy whose curiosity never stopped.That humility is what's resonating with so many parents right now. Because whether your toddler is learning the alphabet or reciting scientific terms, we've all asked ourselves: Am I doing enough to support them?
Joseph's story is a reminder that being 'ahead' cognitively doesn't mean a child needs less nurturing—it often means they need more.
In fact, research shows that gifted children often experience what's known as asynchronous development—where intellectual, emotional, and social growth don't unfold at the same pace. A child may be reading fluently at age 2, but still need the emotional regulation tools of, well, a 2-year-old.
This mismatch can make early childhood extra tricky for parents to navigate. According to the Davidson Institute, gifted children are at higher risk for emotional challenges like anxiety, sensory sensitivity, or perfectionism—especially if their needs go unrecognized or unsupported in traditional environments.
That's why Rose and her husband David reached out to Mensa. Not for prestige, but for support.
'I searched online for any further support available,' Rose said, 'and saw that Mensa offers resources and membership for highly able children.'
Social media can make it feel like you're constantly falling short. One scroll and you'll see toddlers reading chapter books, baking soufflés, or meditating. But Joseph's story isn't a reason to compare—it's a chance to reframe.
Because parenting isn't about raising prodigies. It's about raising whole people.
Some children speak early. Others run first. Some take their time to warm up to the world—and then astonish us with everything they've absorbed.
Regardless of where your child falls on the developmental curve, they deserve to be met with patience, curiosity, and love. That's the real message Joseph's story sends: not that genius is the goal, but that connection is.
If you've ever wondered whether your child is unusually advanced or simply curious, you're not alone. You don't need to test them early or push them academically—but if you're noticing behaviors that feel intense or out of sync with peers, it may be worth exploring gifted development resources.
Organizations like:
SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted)
The Davidson Institute
Mensa's gifted youth program
…offer tools to help parents understand the whole child—not just their test scores.
And whether your child is speaking in paragraphs or still finding their first words, they deserve the same thing: to be supported for who they are, not just what they can do.
Traditional school systems often struggle to support kids who don't fit the average mold—whether they need more help or more challenge. Stories like Joseph's bring attention to the need for flexibility, compassion, and individualized support.
Joseph may have made history, but it's his parents who model a deeper kind of wisdom: Trust your gut. Ask for help. Protect your child's joy, even when their brain seems years ahead.
Because at the end of the day, the most powerful thing a parent can give their child isn't a test score or an academic head start.
It's knowing that who they are—not what they achieve—is already enough.
Related: Why your parenting can't be measured by when your baby hits their milestones

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Boston Globe
31 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Jillian Sackler, philanthropist who defended husband's legacy, dies at 84
Arthur Sackler died in 1987 — nine years before the opioid OxyContin was marketed by the company as a powerful painkiller. Shortly after his death, his estate sold his share of the company to his billionaire brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, for $22.4 million. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The company's misleading advertising claim that OxyContin was nonaddictive prompted doctors to overprescribe it beginning in the 1990s. The proliferation of the medication ruined countless lives of people who became dependent on it. Advertisement In 2021, the company proposed a bankruptcy settlement in which members of the Sackler family agreed to pay $4.2 billion over nine years to resolve civil claims related to the opioid crisis. In return, they sought immunity from future lawsuits. In 2024, the US Supreme Court struck down that deal. A revised settlement was reached in 2025, with the Sacklers and Purdue agreeing to pay $7.4 billion without receiving immunity. The first payment, within three years, included $1.5 billion from the Sacklers and nearly $900 million from Purdue. Advertisement But the backlash from the crisis prompted universities and cultural institutions — including the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — to obliterate the Sackler name from programs, buildings, and galleries, and to declare that they would no longer accept any philanthropy from the family. Jillian Sackler — a British native who was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005 for her philanthropic work — mounted a concerted publicity campaign to absolve her husband of any complicity or culpability, repeatedly reminding the public that he had died long before the scandal erupted. While she stopped short of saying that the drug was the 'root cause' of the opioid crisis, she accused the company of misleading advertising. She told The Guardian that the other members of the family 'have a moral duty to help make this right and to atone for any mistakes made.' As for Arthur, she added: 'I think he would not have approved of the widespread sale of OxyContin.' The couple were avid art collectors and patrons. One art scholar described Arthur Sackler as 'a modern Medici.' The couple was associated with major cultural and academic institutions like the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution; the Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (now part of the Harvard Art Museums); the Arthur M. Sackler Sciences Center at Clark University; and the Arthur M. Sackler Center for Health Communications and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, both at Tufts University. After Arthur Sackler died, his wife continued his philanthropic agenda. Donations from his estate and insurance benefits helped finance the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquia at the National Academy of Sciences, and Studio International, an art magazine. Their name was removed from some, but not all, of those institutions. Advertisement Gillian Lesley Tully was born on Nov. 17, 1940, in Stoke-on-Trent, in central England south of Manchester. She changed the spelling of her first name when she moved to the United States to be with Arthur Sackler, whom she met in 1967 when he was visiting London; they married in 1980. Her father, Kenneth Tully, worked at Midland Bank (now HSBC UK). He married a colleague, Doris Queenie-Gillman Smith. Ms. Sackler had a younger brother, Brian Tully, who died in 2019, leaving her no immediate survivors except for Arthur Sackler's children from an earlier marriage. Among them is Elizabeth Sackler, a philanthropist who has described the estimated $13 billion amassed by her aunts and cousins during the opioid crisis as 'morally abhorrent.' Jillian Sackler attended New York University. The couple moved into a home on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where she continued to live after her husband's death. In her role as president and CEO of the Dame Jillian and Dr. Arthur M. Sackler Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanities, Sackler referred to the other branches of her husband's family as the 'OxySacklers.' In an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2019, she wrote that her husband had been smeared through 'guilt by association.' Advertisement 'Neither Arthur nor his heirs had anything to do with the manufacture or marketing of OxyContin,' she asserted. 'Suggestions that his philanthropy is now somehow tainted are simply false.' She added: 'Arthur is not here to answer back, but I can tell you that blaming him for OxyContin's marketing, or for any other wrongdoing by the pharmaceutical industry, is as ludicrous as blaming the inventor of the mimeograph for email spam.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
After hanging up his Speedos, Tom Daley is throwing himself into dad life
Doing a choreographed dive into a pool from 10 meters above would scare most people. But for Tom Daley, who won five Olympic medals doing just that, it's his job at home that frightens him the most. 'Everything scares me about parenthood because [your kids are] all you think about,' he tells Yahoo Life. The 31-year-old former British diver and his husband, Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, are fathers to two boys: Robert 'Robbie' Ray, who turns 7 this month, and Phoenix Rose, 2. Now that Daley has left Olympic diving behind, announcing his retirement after the 2024 Summer Games, he's trying to navigate what it means to parent in this new chapter of his life. 'For me, being a dad is all about being present, being there to play, being there to love, being able to be completely emotionally available,' he says. 'To be there to pick your kids back up when they fall, and to encourage and support them and make them feel like they're invincible and protecting that feeling for as long as possible before the world tells 'em otherwise.' While Daley is no longer competing on the Olympic stage, he hasn't retired retired. He continues to be a media personality — this month releasing the documentary 1.6 Seconds, which follows his sports achievements and powerful backstory, including the death of his own dad — and is otherwise focused on his knitting brand, Made With Love by Tom Daley. Husband Black, meanwhile, is an American screenwriter, director and producer. Both have work and travel schedules that Daley says can be tricky to juggle alongside the demands of parenting. 'That guilt as a working parent when you have to travel is a lot,' he says. 'One of us always has to stay behind, obviously, to be able to be there with the kids, or the kids come with us. … It's this dance that becomes really quite a challenge.' But there's more flexibility compared to when Daley was diving. 'That was so structured and [there was] so much routine and so many goals and [it was] very one thing to the next,' he says. 'There would be occasions where I'd miss the wake-up with the boys or I would see 'em just before I would leave for training. Whereas now I'm around a lot more.' He does still travel for work, including making trips back from the family's home in Los Angeles to his native U.K. 'I do have to leave occasionally, but when I'm there, I'm there,' Daley says. 'And I think that's the real difference, is that I can be really present and really engaged in everything that they're doing. I can go running around on the weekends with them without worrying about being too exhausted for training the next day.' Robbie, for one, understood his dad's job as a diver and even looked forward to Daley (known at home as 'Papa') taking trips for it. 'I would always bring him back a Lego,' says Daley. As for Black's job as a filmmaker, the boys don't have a grasp on what that means quite yet. 'I think the kids really like to see us happy, and they like to see us doing the thing that we love to do because that's what they hope to do when they're older. They want to be able to do something that they love to do,' says Daley, noting that he won't put pressure on either of them to go into sports. 'If they want to, great. … I'm very much happy to let them try as many things as they want to show interest in, and then we see what happens from there.' As an LGBTQ couple who welcomed their boys through the surrogacy process, Daley and Black might be thought of as an archetype of the 'modern family.' But as Daley points out, there's no real ideal for family dynamics in 2025. 'What is a normal family right now, and what is the best dynamic of a family? I think as long as the child is loved and cared for, that's the most important,' says Daley. 'In order for LGBT people to have a family, it takes a lot of planning. So every child is so extremely loved, wanted, cared for.' He's a believer that parenting 'takes a village' and values their surrogate's role in that as well. 'We had the most magical experience. Our surrogate, who doesn't want us naming her, has become a dear friend, [as well as] her husband and her kids. [She] is someone that was so selfless to be able to help us have our dream family.' Despite the chaos that fills a home with two young children, Daley says he finds the most joy in 'the moments where they just come over to you and give you a hug, unsolicited, and they just want to sit with you and be with you 'cause you are their person. I think that for me is the most magical thing.' And it's not lost on Daley that he was only 7 when he started diving. 'Robbie's getting to those ages where I was starting to do those things,' notes Daley, who credits his late father for allowing him to chase that dream. 'It's very surreal to think.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
L'Oréal to acquire majority stake in British skincare brand Medik8
L'Oréal Group has signed an agreement to acquire a majority stake in UK-based skincare brand Medik8. Inflexion, a European mid-market private equity company, will retain a minority share post-transaction. The acquisition is a strategic move by L'Oréal to bolster its Luxe division with a brand that has a strong foundation in scientific research and innovation. Medik8's performance and potential for international expansion make it a valuable addition to L'Oréal's portfolio. L'Oréal will begin to consolidate Medik8's sales following the transaction's closure. The agreement grants L'Oréal rights to eventually acquire the remaining shares held by minority shareholders. L'Oréal LUXE president Cyril Chapuy stated: 'We are delighted to welcome Medik8 to the L'Oréal family. As a premium skincare range, with high levels of proven efficacy at an accessible price point, Medik8 perfectly complements our existing skincare portfolio. 'We share a strong belief in Medik8's global potential and are excited to embark on this journey together, to build a powerful and impactful brand presence worldwide.' Completion of the transaction is anticipated in the summer or early autumn of 2025, pending regulatory approvals. Founded by scientist Elliot Isaacs, Medik8 is known for its CSA Philosophy: Vitamin C plus Sunscreen by day, Vitamin A by night. Medik8's has expanded its omni-channel sales strategy to include major online and offline retailers in Europe and the US. Medik8 CEO Simon Coble stated: 'I am delighted to be joining forces with a company which shares our vision for the brand's future growth and whose core values align with our deep commitment to science, innovation and above all, results without compromise. I look forward to the next stage in Medik8's journey, as we work together to bring our innovative products to a wider audience.' "L'Oréal to acquire majority stake in British skincare brand Medik8" was originally created and published by Retail Insight Network, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data